Porto is ready to welcome ICPC World Finals 2019

Porto is ready to welcome ICPC World Finals 2019

The world’s biggest and oldest collegiate programming competition is coming to Porto. On April 4, the Alfândega Porto Congress Centre will host the 43rd edition of the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) World Finals, the annual meeting that sets to head some of the greatest young talents in programming from universities from all around the world. Hosted by the University of Porto with the support of the Municipality of Porto, the North Regional Coordination and Development Commission and Tourism of Portugal, this year’s edition will last for a whole week – from March 31 to April 5, 2019 – in which Porto will become the programming capital of the world.

The contest’s grand final will be the culmination of several months of competition between aspiring programmers from all over the world. Solely in the 2018/19 edition, which will be the biggest ever, the challenge has been accepted by 50.000 students, guided by more than 5.000 coaches, representing more than 3.000 universities from 111 countries, after a knockout stage that took place in 530 different locations of the globe.

The city of Porto will welcome the 400 most gifted programmers, divided into 135 teams that, after going through all the qualifiers, will now compete for gold. This year’s most represented countries are the USA, China, India, and Russia (reigning champions). Brazil, Syria, and Egypt will send large delegations as well.

The ICPC World Finals will also be attended by 1500 participants, including 400 students and 250 volunteers. These numbers add up to one of the biggest finals ever, according to the competition’s organizers.

The contest will take place on April 4. The event’s schedule includes a wide range of other activities, such as fairs, hackathons or workshops, among other initiatives to guide the participants in the discovery of Porto as a home for innovation.

Previous year’s winners and finalists include, among several other programmers, entrepreneurs or scientists, co-founder and CEO of Quora, Adam D’Angelo, CEO of Zappos and Manager at Facebook, Tony Hsieh, creator of Apache Spark, co-founder and CTO of Databricks, Matei Zaharia, and the first employee at Google, Craig Silverstein. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Samsung, Accenture or Adobe are some of the top employers of ICPC alumni. The most successful countries in this competition are the USA with 17 wins, and Russia with 13 wins. However, no American university has won in 20 years, and Russian universities have won 7 finals in a row. The Saint Petersburg State University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics is the institution with the most gold trophies in the history of ICPC, with a total sum of seven wins. In 2018, the ICPC Finals were hosted by the Peking University, in China, and the winning team was from the Moscow State University, Russia.